Sin (29 page)

This was making me crazy. It
felt like I had a steering wheel down my pants that was driving me
nuts. Yeah, yeah, so up until very recently, I was supposedly
officially crazy anyway. Is that going to be held against me
forever? Does shit stick like bugs to a windscreen? Give a guy a
break and let bygones be gone by. I'm not, your honour, and never
have been crazy. Teleportation, mental mayhem and seagull
slaughtering might test that denial, but hey, you never believe the
Wet Paint sign unless you're wiping it off your hands because you
just can't resist checking. If you want me to prove to you that,
with a thought, I can turn those innards into outards, then just
say the word.

Hmmm. Didn't think so.

But obviously I jest. Even
though I probably could, I didn't know how. It was all
subconscious. All that death was dealt by the shiver that lived in
the hell of my heart. He and I, Shiver and Sin, weren't on speaking
terms. We didn't share a morning coffee while chatting about the
weather and whether anyone had been ripped apart recently. So
you're safe.

Not that I would anyway, of
course. I might be a little strange, in fact I hope I am (besides
the obvious talents), but I am not crazy.

Promise.

So. Labus Raticus was I? Fine.
Pet project? Double fine. Snivelling little victim on the run and
in hiding? I think not.

I didn't remember any videos. I
didn't remember that session with Connors, nor any others where my
particular brand of barbarism exhibited itself. I didn't remember
being pushed into performing, like Marcel the monkey, missing only
a tiny fez hat and a cup to collect money in. To my knowledge there
were no blanks in my memory, no jagged edges where pages had been
ripped out, screwed up and thrown into the bin, but that didn't
mean they didn't exist. I wasn't sure if I ferreted enough I might
be able to unearth them but I supposed it didn't really matter. If
those memories were windows into the past, their glass shattered by
the Doc swinging a nice big hammer, then there was nothing I could
do. If, on the other hand, I could call in a glazier to do a quick
repair job, then all the better. I'd flick through the yellow pages
of my mind later. Right now there was a fan that was in dire need
of some shit hitting it.

And I had a fistful ready to
throw.

Joy leaned away from me at that
point, a quizzical look on her face.

"You okay?" she asked.

Was I okay? We didn't need to
take a stroll along the prom-prom-prom of my tattered life to see
the myriad reasons why I wouldn't be okey-dokey-pig-in-a-pokey, but
strangely, I was. A light bulb had been flicked on inside of me and
all the darkness has fled for the hills. Well, most of it at least.
A few shadows still lurked there in the nether regions, but I was
sure I could handle them. So yes, I figured I was okay.

"I am," I said.

Joy was still looking at me as
if I had grown another nose or something, maybe sprouted horns and
a yukka out of my ear.

"Promise?"

To Joy and I, a promise was
never made lightly. A promise was just that, a promise. If you said
it, you meant it. It stemmed, I think, from an upbringing where not
every word that came out of our parents' mouths could be trusted.
You always had to take what you were told with a pinch of Lot's
wife. Even if that magic 'P' word was used, we made sure to count
to ten, then again, then not believe it anyway. Far safer that way.
If you set yourself up to be let down, you were never disappointed
when it actually happened. And if you weren't let down - if by some
crazy fluke what you were told actually happened, then bonus. Small
things or big things, it didn't matter. Disappointment was
disappointment to a child. Whether it was asking for a Six Million
Dollar Man toy and a Thunderbird 6 (was that the blue one where the
middle came out and the dinky submersible appeared?) for Christmas
and getting nothing, or finding out that cheques were written
drawing money out of your account, but you weren't the one who'd
signed them, it boiled down to the same thing. If the kid expected
it, it didn't hurt him as much.

Or at least he could pretend it
didn't.

So. We made sure that, if we
couldn't trust our parents completely, we should be able to trust
each other. Perhaps that's a fairly grown up attitude for an 8 year
old, or however many solar revolutions I'd seen. Perhaps not. But
we seemed to realise that we needed someone who we knew, if they
said something, they meant it. Someone who wasn't going to 'borrow'
our paper round money and never pay it back. That kind of thing.
Sibling rivalry was one thing, and we had our fair share of
bickering and battling, but when it came down to it, as I've said,
a promise was a promise.

"Promise."

"You're a strange one, Sin."

"I take that as a compliment,
sis. Especially from a walking corpse."

She smiled and I returned the
grin. The pair of us had joined in the game of doo-doo-twanging
and, even though we were up to our elbows in it, for a moment it
actually smelled sweet. For a moment.

"So where are you taking
us?"

She had to go and spoil it,
didn't she. A second or two of actual semi-normality shattered by a
simple question. If this had been another life, another pair,
another world, that question may well have simply meant 'Pub or
restaurant?' or 'Park or beach?' Unfortunately, this was this life,
this pair and this world. It meant one thing.

Flip and catch.

My problem was that I didn't
know how to do either. Dr. Connors had obviously been pushing me to
discover exactly that, but it was under the influence of drugs. It
was chained to a chair. It certainly wasn't sitting on my bed at my
parents' house. True, I'd managed to flip out of my cell hoping a
nice passing furnace would catch me, but that hadn't quite worked
as I'd planned. I'd figured out how to do that, after a fashion,
but I'd ended up on a beach that was only by chance not in another
country. What if, this time, we did end up in Outer Mongolia. What
if we landed right smack in the cooking pot of a lost Amazonian
tribe of cannibals? What if, indeed, we ended up in the fires of
hell itself? I couldn't control it. The fact that I'd managed to
get myself out of the hospital at all was something I wasn't sure I
could repeat. The possibility of what could easily go wrong,
basically, scared me.

I was still okay. I was still
positive. The non-existent plan of action was still, essentially, a
plan. But to take my sister's hand and jump to who knew where
wasn't something I felt I could risk, and I told her so.

"Sin," she said quietly.

"Yes?"

"It's up to you, brother. We
could simply wait here and face whatever consequences are dumped on
our heads. Or we can do something and get out of here."

"But you could get hurt," I
insisted.

Joy laughed then. A sparkle of
real humour. I didn't see the joke.

"I'm DEAD!" she said. "How am I
going to get more hurt than DEAD?"

She had a point. But she could,
it seemed, come and go as she pleased. She could, it also seemed,
take us into a crazy Twilight Zone version of the Seven Hills in
which psychopathic psychiatrists murdered friendly orderlies. Why
couldn't she get us out of here?

I asked her. If you don't ask,
you don't find anything out.

"Because I can't," she said
simply.

Well that told me.

So, it was down to me. Teleport
(even the word made me cringe) or wait. Hold on...

"Why can't we just walk out of
here? Get a taxi or something and go somewhere?"

"We could," she admitted. A
flash of relief sparked inside of me at the prospect. "But there'd
be witnesses. There'd be a record at the taxi office. We could bump
into someone we knew, like Wendy. If you take us, then even we
don't know where we'll end up.

My point exactly! But the brief
spark was extinguished. I took a deep breath and...

A knock at the door.

* * * *

Joy and I stared at each other
for a breathless moment. I wasn't sure if she was actually
breathing anyway, being deceased, but it was a breathless one for
me. My whole body went still. I think even my heart stopped beating
for a second.

Yes, I know. Joy's wouldn't have
been beating anyway.

A knock at the door again. The
doorbell.

Joy stood and moved slowly to
the window. Even though I hated them, a simple net curtain draped
across the glass. I'd always meant to take it down, perhaps replace
it with a blind, roman or venetian maybe. Or a tab-bottom, I sort
of liked them. I just hadn't got round to it. I was thankful now.
It hid my sister from sight as she peered down to the front door. I
could see by the look on her face that the visitor wasn't just the
milkman wanting his money. It may have been a Jehovah's Witness,
but her look was blacker than the night sky with your eyes closed.
Santa Claus hadn't passed by and not been able to get up to the
chimney. It wasn't the tooth fairy on the hunt for a molar or two,
bag full of coins strapped to her waist for the exchange.

It had to be him.

"It's Connors," she
whispered.

I didn't think. I didn't
hesitate. I don't recall even standing up, but I suppose I must
have. Somehow, though, Joy's hand was in mine and we were no longer
in my room, sitting on the bed. We were... somewhere.

It was dark. It was black. It
was as if it was night. It was as if all the light had got scared
and took flight. Well, it was night, that much I already knew. But
the sound and the air had joined in with the light and skedaddled.
There was an absence of anything other than the feel of my sister's
hand in my own. Was this what a flotation tank felt like? Sensory
depravation? The situation was pretty depraved so we were on to a
winner there. But where had everything gone? Or rather, where had
we gone...?

Suddenly I could feel the blood
pumping in my right ear. A rushing sound with a rhythmic beat that
made me feel as if I were walking in my own heartbeat. The
sensation lasted for no more than a few seconds, little more than a
short stroll, before the rushing sound increased and the world
flooded back around us. There was still silence and darkness, but
now there was also substance. I could feel the air. I could feel
the breath entering and exiting my body. I could hear faint sounds
of life.

Yes, I know I said there was
silence. I didn't mean there was a complete lack of sound, a void
where sound had lived until it had been evicted by a jobsworth
council for not paying council tax. I didn't mean sound had
vanished as if a flying saucer had plopped down out of the sky and
zapped it away to poke and prod and analy probe. I meant it was
quiet. Very quiet. Not the silence from before my ear decided to
run a river through itself, but the silence of a late night, when
only stray cats and restless dogs wandered the streets, and fallen
leaves drifted across roads travelled, normally, by the metal
behemoths that could crush them in a second; cars. The silence that
was only that because it was such a contrast to the cacophony of
the day.

After sound had crept back from
whence it had fled, light followed warily after. Or wearily. A
smattering of stars sprinkled themselves across the sky, a light
icing on the Victoria sponge of the night. Vague shapes formed
around us. They began as shadows that feinted about, threatening to
join together but deciding not to, rather preferring to fool us
into believing they were something they weren't, before finally
giving in and coalescing to become something indistinct but almost
recognisable. My eyes adjusted slowly, seemingly taking their time,
enjoying the fact that I had no idea where we were and wanting to
drag the suspense out for as long as possible. Well jeepers,
peepers, let's wait for those creepers, eh?

Did Joy's eyes needed time to
adjust? Did being dead give her the ability to see better than
someone who still had the beat of a heart to chase the blood around
their veins. Did the jeeping peepers of a corpse dilate or were
they lacklustre and lifeless. Well, I actually knew that already,
at least in the case of my sister. The sparkle of a thousand stars
still shone in her eyes and even the unfortunate fact of being an
inhabitant of the afterlife hadn't dimmed its shine. That led to
another thought. I'd kind of had the idea that this was Joy, as I
knew her. This was physically her. I'd touched her. I smelled her.
This was my sister, in body, mind and what was left of her spirit
after the Grim Reaper had done whatever it was that Reapers did.
Sure, she'd let herself melt back in the forest, flaps of maggot
riddled skin sliding off like butter on hot toast, but other than
that, this was Joy. Once she'd plopped her eye back in and the
cockroaches had finished crawling out of her mouth, my sis was
back, as good as new.

But was she? This couldn't be
her actual body, even though it looked, smelled and felt like her.
It couldn't be. I doubt even Mr Grim was good enough at jigsaw
puzzles to put all those tiny bits of ash back together. He might
have been World Champion at the 500 piece landscape or the 1000
piece Where's Wally Super Edition. Perhaps he could even put all
the Corn Flakes back together to make them look like the cockerel
on the box, but a human body, with thoughts and feelings and
attitude was something else entirely. I didn't think even the
mighty Death himself could manage that particular feat. Maybe that
was just me, though. I was rubbish at jigsaws. I never had the
patience for them to be honest. Even a 500 piecer would bore me
after about twenty-five or so. So maybe Death could rebuild her.
Maybe he did have the technology, and a staple gun, super glue, and
double-sided sticky tape, to get the job done. I didn't know. The
chances weren't good though. So this wasn't Joy, but it was. It
wasn't her body reformed. She wasn't a phoenix risen from the ashes
of her own cremation. But it was still her.